Why no focus on the fretting hand?

Playing Technique
#122

Following an excellent office hour with @Troy it became apparent my picking technique needed some tweaks but what was really slowing me down was the lack of left hand speed. Subsequently, one of the things I noticed is I unconsciously lift my left fingers ridiculously high above the frets when I am playing. It’s as if I think they are going to get tangled in the strings. That is especially true for the pinky finger. Obviously, that gap necessarily slows me down. I watched one of Troy’s many clips and could see that his fingers lift no more than a half an inch above the frets.

Of course, the simple answer is ‘don’t do that’ but it could be that the thumb positioning on the neck improves or hinders the fingers positioning above the frets. Hence, there may be some merit to the left hand technique inquiry.

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#123

Hi Hagen! Sorry it took so long to zero in on the fretting issue. A good “head-to-toe” assessment should uncover anything significantly prohibitive in the first five minutes, and not after I’ve blathered on about unrelated topics in picking for twenty minutes. That’s my fault!

Honestly, I don’t know how much finger “action height” has to do with this. My own fingers go way higher than a half inch all the time. You really can’t see this from a wide shot in our instructional stuff, where the guitar body is facing the camera, but it’s definitely true. It looks ugly sometimes but to be honest I can’t really identify any way that it affects my actual playing. If I need to go faster, the fingers still try to fly away, but they just don’t get as far in the smaller amount of time. If this issue is somehow limiting my speed or making things more difficult, it’s sort of academic because I can’t tell.

How much time have you spent over the years trying to synchronize long fretted and picking sequences of any kind, and trying to go fast while doing that? If you didn’t go through an “Yngwie six-note pattern” phase at some point, this could simply be an issue of never having done that kind of work. Again, a question I feel like we should have covered in our talk as a kind of history taking. And I think we should also rule out other potential issues like injury, arthritis, and so on, just to make sure.

But in general, I think the way forward is doing more of what we discussed, i.e. experimenting with as many types of coordinated left hand ideas as possible to find ones that work and sound best immediately. This can (and should) include legato, and strumming / rhythm patterns too. Anything that involves two-handed coordination offers an opportunity to get better at something. You essentially put together a basket of things that sound the best right now and are fun to play and as musical as possible. And then you jam those with an emphasis on evenness and speed.

As you do this, you’re keeping an eye out for any moment that feels fast, fluid, and where the left hand notes are evenly spaced in time. Any time you have an “a ha” moment like that, make a mental note of what phrase that is, what it sounds like, and what it feels like. You can come back to these phrases again to see if you can recreate the smoothness. Shoot to increase the frequency of these little moments over time, while adding more stuff to the basket to gradually expand the circle of “good sounding” stuff. In terms of the way forward and being as practical as we can, that’s how I’d tackle this.

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#124

Hello Troy,

First no apologies please. I felt your offer to hold office hours was incredibly generous out of the gate and I know my preoccupation with picking had to be addressed before I could move on to what turned out to be more important technique issues.

I can’t say that I have devoted much time to left to right hand synchronization or Yngwie six-note patterns. Our discussion basically flipped my understanding of my way forward on it’s head. I thought my picking technique was the source of my problems. You helped me see my picking motion was pretty good. In fact, I am gaining more control over my picking motion - keeping it relaxed, even and smooth at varying speeds. I don’t practice without a video feed of my right hand anymore and I pay close attention to wrist angle and motion.

With my new confidence in my picking skill, I can shift my focus to the techniques you discuss in Building Speed with 6-note Patterns. I am practicing those “chunks” with a renewed vigor now because I can see why they matter. While my dexterity and speed still pales in comparison with your clips, I know to compare myself with myself- yesterday and I can see progress there.

I do find thumb positioning makes a difference in my comfort playing some chunks so I’ll continue to toy with that some. I appreciate your comments on “action height”. I don’t want to veer off on another trail now that you’ve helped me find a proven path to improvement.

Thanks again for your time. Your attentiveness to your members extends well beyond what I expected and I appreciate the exceptional value that brings.

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#125

“Flying pinky” is a sin of almost every guitarist. Even professionals who seemingly don’t do it when being recorded in a studio often have flying pinky on their live shows.
I do it too but for a different reason )

#126

No problem - it’s very helpful for us to understand what folks are actually doing, and how they’re actually using our stuff. Otherwise, never hearing back, it’s kind of like shouting into the darkness.

Actually, don’t do this. What happens is that you learn to require visual feedback to the point where you can’t do it without looking. Instead, the only sources of feedback you should use for any of these techniques are tactile sensation and sound, because those are the only two kinds of feedback you can guarantee that you’ll always have available.

So in other words, play without looking, and only look occasionally as a test to see if what you’re doing is correct. If it’s not, try to correct and do it again. It’s more work, but this forces you to learn what “correctness” feels like. You can use video for these checks, or mirrors / live video. But again, the live video and mirrors are tempting to look at all the time and that quickly becomes something you can’t stop doing.

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#127

Duly noted. Thank you.

#128

I have thought about this long and hard and I have to disagree due to what I discovered through playing at tempos that are able to(this is so hard to put into words), let’s say tempo’s that force you to reach beyond hereditary considerations.

What I do agree with is that the “transition times” are the key, but at the slower tempos you can cheat - the mind is a very easily fooled and fooling factor in this enterprise.
What is able to happen when attempts are made at faster tempos(in other words with your favorite recording which may not be at top speed), but within the structure you can go for subdivisions of the groove so that exact fidelity to the beat is not necessary (the calculus method of approaching a limit and never reaching it - although Steely Dan comes the closest), this can lead to a embodied understanding of what “transition time” really means better than any description can.

The point is transition time never gets faster, but what does happen is it gets more accurate and that accuracy allows for extremely articulate production that simply does not and cannot exist at “slow tempos”, ever.

The accurate idea in your statement is that time as tempo changes is not the issue but recognition of what articulation actually is.

Let’s look at it this way, what’s the big deal about “tone” for the greats why is it so important? After all within reason that can sound great on anything at anytime can’t they? It’s because at those levels of articulation the instrument is “almost” impossible to play and they know that either consciously or unconsciously, and that the difference in perception is so slight between making something happen and not because the string is very slippery, spongy affair(both metaphorically and literally), especially transitions from any finger going up to the index finger or using the index finger as an anchor.

Just thought I would point this out to all thanks for the opportunity.

I do realize anything said leaves something else unsaid.

#129

I was wondering the same thing. I went through the pickslanting primer, and when I started the 6’s pattern on a single string my right hand took off. I plateaued very quickly because my fretting hand could not keep up. I had to go back and watch how Troy was fretting. I made the adjustment and boom my speed started picking up again.

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#130

When you say you made the adjustment, what do you mean? How did you change what you were doing to achieve success?

#131

Hi,
My left hand was at angle. My arm was rotated clockwise so the palm of my hand was facing towards the bridge. There was zero space between my first finger and the neck. If you look at Troy’s left hand you will see that his arm is positioned so his palm is facing up. Which makes a space between his first finger and the neck. Also I’m now trying to just use the very tip of my fingers to touch the strings. Flattening the palm so it faces straight up.

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#132

Fun thing is that I spent a lot of time learning to put my index finger to strings since you need it to mute the higher strings. I started to play guitar with acoustic so there was no such problem, but once you go high-gain… totally different story with a lot of neaty tricks and cheats.

#133

I’m just going to add the learning to play Django and occasionally playing it with only 2 fingers opened my mind to left hand fingering. Many times a small position change and sliding around here and there can make certain runs sooooooo much easier than 1 finger per fret type of playing.

I also remember in one of EJ’s Hot Licks videos he talks about left hand thumb placement and at some point when saying to keep your thumb behind neck he plays an example and his thumb almost immediately pops up from behind neck. :smile:

#134

Paul said that he already had a “ferocious” legato technique before even attempting fast alternate picking, so he already had that half of his puzzle in terms of achieving speed under his belt, which allowed him to focus on his picking hand when building his alternate picking chops.

Also, it’s possible that he emphasises the importance of the left hand speed for hand sync due to his teaching experience with students whose picking hand was faster than their fretting hand (he mentions that at the end of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpJNUGHxC3M).

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#135

At the cost of being off topic: thanks for this video, it’s got some interesting picking hand shots! Also, in the very intro (the Scarified riff) one can hear pretty clearly that Paul is using a bendy pick!

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#136

Without a doubt, left hand control is crucial.
I’ve seen this before, thanks for sending.
Paul is awesome!

Cant underestimate the EVH LH sequences, etc as a groundwork for developing rock legato.
Especially his work on Spanish fly.

Paul seriously pulled alot of those ideas into his LH playing.

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#137

The wonderful thing about music is that, unlike professional sports, someone can express their feelings and really move an audience with limited technical ability.

A father could be very comfortable telling their child that.

#138

I would add that we are observing time and time again, particularly via the “table tapping tests” (linked below) that most people seem capable of reaching the speeds required in most musical applications (say, picking 16th notes at 160-180bpm for a few bars).

This, of course, assuming the person does not have injuries or medical conditions that directly affect the joints/muscles used in guitar playing.

So, while the average person might not be able to set a tremolo picking world record, we expect that with enough practice (and of the right kind!) they could still tackle the majority of musically useful speeds.

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